Top Ten Things I Learned at SQL PASS 2010 Today

10. The food served at dinner leaves much to be desired.
9. Report Designer v.3 (in SQL Server 2008 R2) has a mapping feature that can be really cool, but needs a lot of massaging to be truly useful.
8. Building a cube in Analysis Services works very easily if the data are stored in a "star schema." I don't know what that is, but I intend to find out.
7. The PowerPivot tool in MS Excel 2010 is not innate to Excel and must be downloaded and installed separately.
6. The PowerPivot tool is a basic cube technology, so it may not be necessary to learn how to make a "star schema" in order to use cube-style analysis on Shelby v.5 data.
5. Never assume that room 2 is immediately adjacent to room 3.
4. Recursive Common Table Expressions, which I have only recently discovered how to use, should be avoided because of the overhead they add to a query.
3. Tally tables are a way to avoid recursive CTEs.
2. SQL Server "Denali" is going to be available tomorrow for public review of the beta code.
1. SQL Server "Denali" includes "Crescent," a tool that will take PowerPivot ease of use and put it into  Reporting Services, along with a slew of new graphical representation report tools that are simply mind-blowing.